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4 Factors To Consider When Defining Your Niche

Working in any niche can be more challenging when you don’t like what you’re doing. When working from home, it’s important to choose a niche that suits your passions because when you love what you’re doing, you wake up in the mornings with the energy and the enthusiasm to get to work. However, passion alone should not drive your decision on a niche, one of the quickest routes to a business failure is to pick a niche that doesn’t have the potential to bring in the profits you’re looking for. Once you have chosen your niche, you need to focus on your keywords. When you choose a niche and set up a website, you want to use every means available to you to generate profit. Often overlooked, keywords are a major player in the arena of making money. Let’s take a closer look at these three factors to consider when defining your niche: (1) Your Passion, (2) Niche profitability, (3) Profitable Keywords

Select A Niche That Suites Your Passion

Take a few minutes and consider which niches might fit with your passions. If you’re not sure what your passions are, imagine you have a whole day to yourself. What do you spend it doing? Would you spend it perfecting new recipes? Exploring your city? Writing movie reviews? If you’re still having trouble, look at your existing hobbies. What do you enjoy doing in your spare time? What do you spend your money on?

Taking a moment to consider what you love doing will help you decide which niche is the best fit for you. Or maybe you recently discovered a niche you’re passionate about. What do you do then? Begin reading and researching. Fully immerse yourself in your chosen niche. Sign up for every email list that you can. It pays off in big ways to know the current issues and events in your niche.

Spend time browsing websites – both of experts and amateurs alike. Blogs are a great way to learn about what’s happening in the niche industry you plan to use for your business. Search blog directories for your category by going to a search engine and typing in “blog directories.” Then choose a blog directory and browse it by category.

By now, you probably have a list of potential niches just waiting for you to tap into. If so, it’s time to trim that list. Par it down to your top three. These three should be your main choices – the niches you have the most interest in.

Don’t just go by income level (although you should consider that, too). Just remember when your niche interests you, it shows to your customers and when you’re only in it for the profit you can make, that shows too. Choose a niche that you can earn an income in and gain personal satisfaction from.

Once you know which niche is right for you, take a minute and ask yourself, “What’s not being covered? Which audiences are being ignored? Who are the rising stars on the horizon and how will they change the niche?” Since you already have an interest in these niches, you’ll be better at gaining consumers that other entrepreneurs are missing.

Choose a Niche That Has Plenty of Profit Potential

Now that you have selected a niche that you’re personally interested in it is time to find a niche that’ll bring in the kind of money you’re after, seek what the big companies look for. You will want to consider what are the hot selling items? You don’t have to know this off the top of your head. Look for these top selling items on sites such as Amazon or eBay or other market websites.

The bestsellers (just check to see what ranking the items have) will tell you what the pulse of the people buying is. So for example, if you see that on Amazon, a product sells well enough to be in the top ten, you know you’re onto something. Let’s say one of those products was a brand new fitness gadget and they were selling like hotcakes. You’d find plenty of potential by tapping into that market.

You’ll want to check out the self-help books to see what’s selling there. Books on depression, weight loss, and relationships always sell well and that’s a clue to let you know that the market is and always will be wide open for self-help niches and the products that you can buy dealing with that subject.

If you become an affiliate, you’ll want to pay attention to the dollar amount you’ll earn by becoming an affiliate rather than the percent of commission. You’ll earn more money that way. Look for tangible products for your niche as well.

Make sure you don’t make the mistake of setting up a niche based on what’s considered a here today, gone tomorrow item. Remember the Beanie Babies? They were all the rage and people just couldn’t get enough of them. But where are they now? They fell off the scene because they were just a fad. You want to seek out a niche that has long-term potential so that your business will thrive now and for many years to come.

After Nailing Down a Niche You Need to Tackle Keywords

The way to discover which niche has the ability to make money is easy. You have to do your research. After you’ve picked your niche, you need to do some keyword research in order to get the word out about your site. Many beginning entrepreneurs make the mistake of choosing their niche and then launching a website shortly after that with no thought to keyword research.

But entrepreneurs that grasp the benefits of well-chosen keywords take the time to research because they understand the relationship between traffic and keywords. Proper keyword research will allow you to know which words get your target audience’s attention because those are the words they use themselves in a search engine.

Keyword research will position your website or blog at the top of search engine results so that your site receives plenty of traffic. When you’re targeting keywords, even subtle things like the plural form of a word make a difference.

For instance, if your niche is pet training then it’s important to know that the word ‘dog’ receives forty-five million searches a month while the word ‘dogs’ receives only sixteen million. Your goal is to select keywords that will garner you the most searches per words. What you’re looking for is something with little competition but a lot of searches.

You can shell out money to pay for fancy keyword tools like Market Samurai to help you in your quest, but there are free alternative tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool where you still get the information you need to get the traffic you want. Using the wrong keywords means you’re missing out on important traffic and missing out on the sales you could be making. You can use the wrong keywords and bring people to your site, but it’ll be those people who are not interested in what you’re selling. You want your keywords to be relevant to your audience.

When you build your site, you also want to make sure that you not only use keywords in your paragraphs, but you also want to make sure that you use keywords in your titles. When you pick a name for your website, select one with a keyword or keywords in the URL. Remember the better you use SEO on your site, the higher it will rank when search engines display the results. One of the mistakes entrepreneurs make is naming their pages incorrectly in general.

Be specific. Don’t have an ‘About’ page. Going back to the earlier example of pet training, have an ‘About Pet Training’ page. When you put up a contact page or box, use a keyword phrase there as well. Such as, “Contact me for more information on pet training.” This nets you additional keywords.

Making Bank With Both Broad and Long Tail Keywords

The concept of using keywords is a simple one. Those are words that identify your website and bring it to the attention of search engines. Without the right keywords, your batting average for customers and sales will be pretty dismal. Many online entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs grasp that keywords are vitally important for traffic, but what they often don’t get is that broad keywords and long tail keywords can be used to bring in the money.

How are these different from just using any keywords? Broad keywords are words that don’t narrow down the topic – think short, one word versus phrases – for example, car versus buying a Honda Odyssey, or tree versus how to plant an Oak tree.

When you look up long tail keywords, you might see that there aren’t as many results for those words as there are for broad keywords. But there are more of those types of phrases, so the actual traffic volume can exceed what you’d get with a broad search ranking. You want to bring in people who know what they want. Someone who types in the word cars may be looking for an animated cartoon called cars, the history of cars, used cars, new cars, and more.

People type in long tail phrases is telling you what it is they want. For instance, here’s a good one – “How to buy cars without getting ripped off.” You could sell someone a guide on buying a new car because you’d know exactly what their needs are compared to someone just typing in ‘cars.’

If you were in the business of selling self-help products for depression, you could use depression as a broad keyword, but to get more specific you’d use long tail keywords such as ‘postpartum depression symptoms’ or ‘signs of depression in men.’ Not only will you pull in people searching for information on depression in general by using broad keywords, but you’ll also get people searching for depression as it pertains to their situation.

When you do a search to find broad keywords, you’ll see that there are a lot of searches per month for that word or words. But the more focused your keywords, the better your site performs when the search engine spiders come crawling. You want the people who find your site to be the ones that are looking for what you have to offer.

Choosing a niche is about considering your profitability as well as your passion. You should take careful consideration, and a great deal of research before you choose your niche. Once you have your niche it is important to focus on your approach, you can do this by selecting effective keywords to focus on. As long as you consider your passion, the profitability and research your niche to find effective keywords, especially long tail keywords, you should have great success.